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My Father's Fortune

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My Father's Fortune You loved your last book...but what are you going to read next? Using our unique guidance tools, Lovereading will help you find new books to keep you inspired and entertained. Opening Extract from… My Father’s Fortune A Life Written by Michael Frayn Published by Faber & Faber All text is copyright © of the author This Opening Extract is exclusive to Lovereading. Please print off and read at your leisure. michael frayn My Father’s Fortune A Life First published in 2010 by Faber and Faber Ltd Bloomsbury House 74–77 Great Russell Street London wc1b 3da Typeset by Faber and Faber Ltd Printed in England by CPI Mackays, Chatham All rights reserved Michael Frayn, 2010 The right of Michael Frayn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978–0–571–27058–3 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Contents Homburg 1 part one 1 Smart Lad 9 2 House of Straw 19 3 Duckmore 38 4 Furniture and Fittings 55 5 Quick / Slow 74 6 Fire Resistance 91 7 A Glass of Sherry 104 part two 1 Childcare 129 2 Top to Bottom 148 3 Skylark 169 4 Chez Nous 186 5 Black Dog 203 6 Closer 222 7 Legatees 236 List of Photographs 255 Homburg The handle of my study door softly turns. I look up from my typewriter, startled. The two older children are at school, my wife’s out with the baby, the house is empty. I’m working alone on the top floor. The door opens a few inches. Around the edge of it, with a cer- tain deferential caution, comes a hat. A black homburg. The year must be 1969, I realise from the internal evidence when I reconstruct the scene in my memory. No one round our way locks their front doors in 1969. But then no one still wears homburg hats. I’m looking at the last homburg in south-east Lon- don, perhaps in western Europe. I feel a familiar touch of exasperation. Of course! Naturally! The black homburg! Just when I’ve got a chance to work undis- tracted! Why hadn’t he phoned, like anyone else? Why hadn’t he rung the bell, or shouted ‘Anyone at home?’ Why hadn’t he at least taken his hat off ? The hat is followed by a pair of spectacles – a hearing aid – a trim grey moustache. And my father’s familiar smile, like the sun coming up. My exasperation evaporates in the warmth of it. 1969, yes, when I was writing my first play. It must have been. The good year, shortly before the end of his life, the year’s reprieve between his first cancer and the second. He just happens to be passing, driving from somewhere in south-east London to some- where else, on his way to put his head round the doors of build- ing contractors and architects in Woolwich or Eltham, selling them roofing. He has always been turning up like this in my life, [ 1 ] my father’s fortune unannounced, on the move, a law unto himself, excused by his deafness from the usual social conventions. Not always in a black homburg – sometimes in a brown trilby. But usually in one or the other. When he takes the hat off it reveals the last of his trim silvering hair receding above the leathery corrugations of his forehead, and brushed precisely flat. His features are as neat and well-ordered as his three-piece suit and polished toecaps. He has a touch of Fred Astaire’s lightness and quickness about him. ‘Not interrupting the muse, am I?’ he asks, as I make him cof- fee. ‘Not depriving the world of some great new book?’ ‘It’s not a book this time – it’s a play.’ ‘Are you? Where are you going?’ ‘A play. The thing I’m writing.’ ‘Bit crowded at this time of year, Brighton.’ He can probably hear me, actually, even if he hasn’t turned his hearing aid on. It’s over a quarter of a century since he first went deaf, and I’ve long been used both to raising my voice and to his pretending not to understand even so, for comic effect. More smiles when my wife comes in. ‘Would you like some lunch?’ she asks him, but after a lifetime of softly modulating her voice she finds it almost impossible to make him hear even the vowel sounds. He’s rather in rather in awe of her, though, so he doesn’t like to disrupt the flow of the conversation. ‘Not too bad,’ he replies. ‘And the children?’ ‘They’re very well. But how about lunch? Something to eat?’ ‘No fear!’ ‘No?’ ‘Of course not. Up Dog Kennel Hill and across Peckham Rye.’ It’s forty years since my father died. I’ve often thought about him since, of course. As he was when I was a child, as he was when I grew apart from him in my adolescence, as he was when we became closer again in those last years of his life. I can some- times still feel some of his expressions on my own face and know, [ 2 ] Homburg even without a mirror, that I’m looking like him. And yet I’m so unlike him! Slow where he was quick, scruffy where he was dap- per, head-in-the-clouds where he was feet-on-the-ground. And inside, behind our mutual expressions, in the way we think and feel, we’re totally different. Aren’t we? In all the years I’ve spent imagining myself into the heads of characters in plays and novels I’ve never really tried to feel what it was like to be that rather striking real character in the homburg hat. Your parents are your parents. They are what they are. It was my children, wondering about their own origins, who first set me thinking about him in a rather different way. They wanted me to write something about my childhood – anything about the past that I could remember, before it had all vanished from my memory for ever. Rebecca, my eldest daughter, felt that she and her two sisters – all of them now older than I was when that hat came round the door – ‘had risen from an unknown place’. For a long time I resisted. How could I ever contrive to lay my hands on that lost world, which had now slipped so far away even from me? And then it occurred to me that it was my father who was one of my last links with that elusive past, and who might take us all back to it. Once again I saw his head coming round my door – the homburg, the hearing aid, the smile. Sixty-eight years of good and bad fortune were written in the corrugations of his forehead, the crinkled skin fanning back from the corners of his eyes, and the deep curving crevasses on either side of his mouth. So many things I should have asked him while he was still here to tell me. I might even have tried to talk to him about the thing he never once mentioned, the event that in one single instant broke his life in two – that broke all our lives in two – into Before and After. Did he ever wish he could have said something about it to me? I went back to my very first conscious memory of him. I sup- pose I was three years old. He had appeared unexpectedly through a door, just as he did in my recollection of him at the end of his life. And – yes – wearing a homburg hat. He was coming in through [ 3 ] my father’s fortune the French windows of the dining room, just home from work, still carrying his files and folders. What makes this particular occasion stick in my mind is that I was crying, and that I lied to him about the reason. I’d misbehaved in some way and been scolded by my mother, but I felt so ashamed of my babyishness that I told him it was because I’d banged my head on the edge of the dining table. Was it really the same man under that first homburg and the second, thirty-three years later? What had happened to him in between was etched not only into the skin of his face but deep into the core of the man himself. But then, if I was three when he appeared through the French windows, he must have been thirty- five. More than half a lifetime was written upon him already. I go over that first encounter with him again, now I’m trying so hard to remember things, and what catches my attention this time is not my lying, or his sympathetic smile as he was taken in, but an odd marginal detail of the scene: the fact that he was coming in through the French windows. They were at the back of the house. If he’d just arrived home from work he’d got out of the car on the driveway by the front door. Why had he walked all the way round to the back garden before he came indoors? Maybe he’d forgotten his keys. Or maybe he already had a pen- chant for appearing through doors unexpectedly.
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